Yesterday I was on the receiving end of the ‘every woman should be financially independent' comments – yet again.
Well, I’m sorry, but I’ve tried, really I have. I have applied for interesting challenging jobs and I’ve applied for tedious, boring jobs with an equally stunning lack of success. Maybe I should set my sights a bit lower and go for genuinely menial level jobs that anyone can do – but wouldn’t that just be to swap one form of frustration for another? And no doubt I would then be accused of ‘under-selling’ myself.
Which brings me to Barabara Ehrenreich. I overheard bits of what she was saying on ‘Start the Week’ a couple of weeks back, though as usual it was only in passing and I didn’t catch her name. However, there was an interview with her in this week’s New Statesman.
http://www.newstatesman.com/People/Religion
What she set out to do was write an account of ‘corporate America’ from the inside, but in order to do that she first needed to get a job. And despite her best efforts, she got nowhere, and ended up writing about the world of the white-collar unemployed, of recruitment advisors, life coaches, image consultants and self help (‘Bait and Switch’).
www.BarbaraEhrenreich.com
What struck me most were her comments about ‘positive thinking’: ‘There is this sense that if you just have a positive attitude you can control your circumstances entirely, which is an idea that has no scientific basis at all.’ Hooray! somebody has said it at last - the emperor isn't wearing any clothes!
As the NS article points out: ‘One of the most insidious effects of this culture is the extent to which it loads shame and self-loathing on the individual. With its teaching that any failures are simply the result of having the wrong attitude (nothing to do with economic downturn, say, or corporate restructuring), it offers an obvious recipe for self-hatred.’
This is the mirror image of the stuff I was posting a couple of months back about apparently ‘successful’ people who torture themselves with guilt because they don’t feel ‘happy’.
If you have material success, you must be happy, and if not, it’s your own fault. And if you don’t have material success, that’s your fault too, because you don’t have the right ‘attitude’. Sounds like the new version of the ‘undeserving poor’.